1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the telecommunications field and, in particular, to a method and system for providing spatialized audio in conference calls.
2. Description of Related Art
Conference calls are becoming an increasingly common communications medium. For example, a large corporation can have offices located throughout the world, but the corporation's employees at different locations are often required to consult with each other by conference call, in order to develop conclusions and solutions for pressing problems. Furthermore, the younger generation's current use of Internet chat rooms for "text-chats" will likely extend that practice to "voice-chats" (i.e., conference calls).
The conventional conference call systems in use today utilize a single voice channel for all participants, and a moderator typically controls the conference calls. As such, an individual can participate in only one conference call at a time.
A number of significant problems exist with the existing approaches taken for making conference calls. For example, during a conference call, it is often difficult to recognize who is speaking by voice alone. This recognition problem can be exacerbated if there are several participants in the conference call with similar regional accents or voices that sound similar. Furthermore, two or more conference call participants can be speaking at the same time, which degrades the conversations. Another problem with existing conference call approaches is that they do not make it possible to divide a conference call into a number of sub-conferences, and also to allow participants to move freely between the sub-conferences. Yet another problem with existing conference call approaches is that a moderator needs to be appointed whenever the number of participants exceeds a certain limit. However, as described in detail below, the present invention successfully resolves the above-described problems.